Sheryl Howard always wanted a house filled with children. She wanted 10 children and if all of hers had survived, that's how many she would have had.

Instead between her first child and her second, she miscarried seven times and it broke her heart.

"'You actually say, 'What's wrong? Am I woman enough to have babies?' she said softly.

That's why the second child she gave birth to, Dwight Howard II, was special right from his first days on earth.

Although she only gave birth to three, years later her home still filled with children.

Boys, specifically. Basketball players, more specifically. And as her son Dwight grew into the best high school basketball player in America, at a school so small his graduating class totaled 16 people, those boys grew with him. They rode home from basketball practice with the Howards, sometimes spent the night, woke up the next morning and went to school all together.

Many came from broken homes, some didn't know their fathers. Their families intertwined with Howard's, a two-parent household with three children.

Together they won the Georgia Class A state championship for Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy in 2004, Dwight Howard II's senior year. A few months later the Orlando Magic selected Howard No. 1 overall in the NBA draft.

As Howard's lifestyle transformed into that of a superstar, those friends that played on Howard's high school team are guys he can trust. In his life now, there are fewer people he can trust.

Even as his parents watch one of the NBA's biggest stars change, those high school teammates see the same Dwight Howard who used to make them all listen to Barney the purple dinosaur on bus rides to games.

They are still family.

Offering a helping hand

By the time Darryl Slack went to live with the Howards, his life was already changing drastically.

Slack grew up poor in Atlanta, raised by a single mother who struggled to make ends meet. Dinner wasn't always a given. Slack and his younger brother would often keep their things in boxes. His mother would wonder why. It was because they never knew when they'd have to move.

Drugs and violence were common in their neighborhood.

"My mom did the best that she could," Slack said. "It was just she couldn't keep a job and keep a roof over our head like she really wanted to. The stability she really couldn't give it to us."

She and her boys moved in with a man during some particularly rough years. Slack said the man sold crack in their home — it made Slack feel hypocritical when he went to drug free rallies at school. He said he witnessed domestic violence.

"I grew up watching that and becoming angry at any other man that would come into my mother's life," Slack said. "We used to run them away, me and my brother. I didn't trust any man."

The one place Slack could escape was on a basketball court near a makeshift church. Neighborhood kids constructed it out of crates outside a community center. They used to play in a nearby gym. Then someone got killed inside it and the gym shut down.

Some gambled there. Some sold drugs. Slack practiced basketball moves he could make on older kids who wouldn't let him play with them. He showed up at 9 a.m. on hot Atlanta mornings and shot hoops as a six-, seven- and eight-year-old.

"There was so much joy that came over me because I got a chance to play against the bigger guys, out here, having fun," Slack said. "There was nothing else in the world. Being in the back of that church, playing on crates was Walt Disney World."

Slack enrolled at SACA for his freshman year at the urging of a youth basketball coach.

"Basketball junkie," said Courtney Brooks, then the basketball coach at SACA, on his first impression of Slack.

When a bill came in the mail to pay tuition, his mother couldn't afford it. As they do for several students, SACA found a way to keep Slack. He moved in with the Howard family for a few months.

Slack and Dwight II played basketball in the yard. When the ball rolled near the fence, Slack would let it go. Dwight had a mean dog named Tiger who stayed by the fence.

"Tiger grew up with me," Dwight said. "He wanted to protect me at all costs so he always made sure that I was protected. If Slack came close to me he would just start barking."

The UPS man brought boxes of mail for Dwight filled with letters from college basketball programs. Sometimes Howard, then a sophomore, would take the full boxes without opening them straight to the Herby Curby trash cans and throw them away.

"Why don't you want to read that mail?" Slack asked.

"Everyone's saying the same thing," Howard said.

Besides, Howard wasn't going to college anyway. Slack remembers him saying privately he wanted to play in the NBA.

Soon afterward Slack moved in with the couple he calls his godparents. They took him in, finished raising him and helped his mother stabilize her life.